Welcoming Zac Maufe to AUI

Earlier today I posted on Slack to welcome Zac Maufe to AUI as our Chief Commercial Officer. I want to share a bit more context here, because the timing is not an accident.

For the past eight and a half years, Ori and I have been almost entirely focused on one thing: building the right technology for task-oriented dialogue.

Not a better chatbot. Not a slightly improved agent framework. A new computational architecture that can actually be trusted to handle conversations that end in real actions – bookings, payments, claims, trades – executed with guarantees.

That work led to Apollo-1, our neuro-symbolic foundation model for task-oriented conversational AI. Apollo-1 separates the two halves of conversational AI that have been mixed together until now:

• Transformers and LLMs for open-ended language – creative, explanatory, exploratory.
• A stateful neuro-symbolic core for task execution – explicit state, policies, tools, guarantees.

Over millions of real conversations and encoded turns, we’ve learned how to give organizations something they’ve never really had in this space: behavioral certainty. If the System Prompt says “always verify ID above $200,” Apollo-1 actually always does it.

We are now nearing a moment we’ve been working toward since 2017:
a self-serve release that lets any company, from solo founder to Fortune 500, spin up its own task-oriented conversational agents on top of Apollo-1. You define your tools, policies, and behaviors in the System Prompt; Apollo-1 takes care of making sure those behaviors execute.

That’s one side of what happens next.

The other side is bringing this technology beyond self-serve into the world’s largest companies, where the stakes – and the complexity – are highest. That means deep, multi-year programs with banks, insurers, airlines, retailers, healthcare providers and others, where Apollo-1 becomes infrastructure for how their conversations run.

This is where Zac comes in.

Zac has spent years on the other side of the table: first as EVP & Chief Data Officer at Wells Fargo, and most recently leading regulated industries at Google Cloud, working directly with the CEO on how AI gets deployed inside some of the most demanding organizations on the planet. (hint: it’s hard without neuro-symbolic AI). I think Zac knows what it takes to move from an impressive demo to a system that actually runs at scale, in production, under real-world constraints, and I think that’s what drew him to AUI. 

At AUI, Zac will lead our commercial efforts: from strategic partnerships to large-scale programs, ensuring we do everything required in order to put Apollo-1 to work inside the biggest enterprises in the world. Self-serve will let any company build its own agents. Zac’s focus is to make sure the largest global companies can go much further – integrating Apollo-1 into their core businesses as critical infrastructure.

On a personal note, Zac is also a friend. Ori and I got to work with him closely during his time at Google Cloud, and we’ve wanted to build something together for a long time. The fact that it’s happening now, just as Apollo-1 is ready to move from R&D into broad commercialization, feels exactly right.

Please join me in welcoming Zac Maufe to AUI.